Bigfoot hobbit could be ancient island human

The tale of Homo floresiensis – aka the hobbit – is beginning to read less like a Tolkien epic than an Agatha Christie whodunit.

Two studies add a new twist to the plot. One claims that the skeleton's ape-like feet push back its ancestry near the dawn of Homo. Another argues that the hobbit is a later offshoot of Homo erectus, dwarfed by aeons of island isolation.

"Either answer is pretty damn exciting," says William Jungers, a palaeoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, who led the analysis of the foot. "It's telling us something pretty amazing about human evolution."

Much subsequent research has focused on the skull, which encased a 417 cubic-centimetre brain – about the size of a chimpanzee's and a third the size of a human adult brain.

Since island species, separated from their mainland kin, tend to shrink over evolutionary time, the main thrust of the "hobbit as separate species" arguments have focussed on its small brain. However another theory holds that the skull is simply that of a diseased Homo sapiens.

Lack of resources could select for smaller and smaller bodies, and some researchers argue that power-hungry brains can shrink even more drastically than the rest of the body.

Island dwarf

"It might be advantageous to the animal not to invest in such a large organ," says Eleanor Weston, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, whose new study contends that H. floresiensis was an insular dwarf of H. erectus.

But even scaled down to the hobbit's 1-metre, 30 to 40 kilogram frame, H. erectus would boast a brain of 500 to 650 cubic centimetres – small but still too big to explain the Hobbit skull.

However, Weston contends that such figures underestimate the dwarfing of mammalian brains that actually occurs on islands. She and colleague Adrian Lister compared two extinct species of dwarf hippopotami found on Madagascar with the modern, full-sized beasts found only on the African mainland.

True brain size

The dwarf species went extinct in the past 1000 years, and they diverged from mainland hippopotami sometime between 50,000 and two million years ago, Weston says.

Using more than 30 full-size hippopotami of varying age and size as reference points, Weston and Lister calculated the scaled-down brain size of 24 dwarf hippos. These models consistently overestimated the true size of the dwarf's brains by about 24 or 30 per cent.

"If Homo floresiensis really had undergone this process of dwarfing, potentially something like Homo erectus could be the ancestor," Weston says.

Applying a scaling factor to a dwarfed H. erectus comes up with Hobbit-sized brain that's between 378 and 493 cubic centimetres, depending on the H. erectus specimen used.

Bizarre foot

"My problem with that is that it doesn't speak to the rest of the skeleton," says Jungers, who also presented his analysis of the hobbit's bizarre foot at an anthropology conference last year.

For starters, the feet of H. floresiensis are far longer than would be expected of 1-metre tall H. erectus or H. sapiens. The resulting need to drag its feet back high with each step to avoid kicking the ground would have limited its ability to move swiftly. It also has unarched feet. "It's never going to win the 100-yard dash, and it's never going to win the marathon," Jungers says.

Both features also point to an ancestor that predates fleet-footed H. erectus, Jungers says. "If in fact human evolution redesigned the bipedal foot in some way, these guys missed the train."

A closer inspection of the bones in the hobbit's nearly complete left foot reveal both modern and archaic characteristics. Its short big toe resembles that of an australopithecine like Lucy, while the shapes of the toe bones appear human. "It's definitely a head-scratcher," Jungers says.

He speculates that the hobbit's closest relative is a species of human more ancient than H. erectus, with a smaller brain – perhaps H. habilis.

Satisfying theory

Robert Martin, a palaeontologist at Chicago's Field Museum not involved in either study, says Jungers' explanation is more satisfying than the idea of a H. erectus, dwarfed by island-life. "That could explain the small brain without requiring any major reduction," he says. But adds that there is no indication in the fossil record that any human species older than H. erectus travelled beyond Africa.

However, Martin still thinks the hobbit is an unusually small human that suffered from a developmental disease, possibly microcephaly.

"This needs to be confirmed by some fossils," says Jungers, who hopes a five-year excavation of other spots in Flores that's in the works will determine what the ancestors of the Hobbit looked like.

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The skull of a modern human (bottom) with the grapefruit-sized skull of a Homo floresiensis (Image: Rex)